Tag Archives: Literature

Literature: Second Comings

26 Wednesday Mar 2008

Posted by in Art, Literature & Culture, Interviews (All), Interviews: The Arts, Publication: Verve Magazine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Published: Verve Magazine, Features, Travel, March 2008

With 27 novels and 14 books of criticism and non-fiction under his belt, Paul Theroux, American travel writer, who has spent extensive time in Asia and Africa, is ready to release his latest travel chronicle later this year. On his recent visit to the city, the writer of the best-selling The Great Railway Bazaar, and the winner of many an award, regales fans in Mumbai

Travel01

I wonder what a prolific travel writer would be like – well read and engaging? Paul Theroux is all of that and more, poetic at heart, and likely to espouse on his literary influences rather than his own work. Able to look at himself with humour and reticence, he remarks after being warmly introduced to the audience at a panel discussion, “Now, I begin to believe in myself.” Visiting Mumbai by chance when the Calcutta Book Fair got cancelled at the last minute, Theroux decided to tour the country for three weeks as a guest of the State Government.

Dreams of India began in the early 19th century, in the neighbourhood where Theroux grew up and are alive to this day. Ralph Waldo Emerson circulated copies of the Bhagwad Gita amongst his friends. Henry Thoreau and Mark Twain were both inspired by India. Twain’s Following the Equator, in turn, was a great source of inspiration for Theroux. Richard Henry Dana served as his role model, the perfect travel writer – bold, brave, uncomplaining, with an ability to survive discomfort. “When I thought of my first travel book, I thought of going to India and in the most interesting and unforgettable way – by train instead of plane.” Wanting to connect it to where he lived earlier–London–Theroux, studying a map, figured it was as simple as joining the dots. The journey turned out to be memorable enough to make for a fascinating travel book.

Paul Theroux’s recent visit to India is all about second comings. As he often notes, there are exceedingly few travel writers who have been able to return to a destination after having made a journey there once. In fact, all the great ones haven’t been able to do so. “When you get older, the world changes – in ways you cannot guess – it is possible to make predictions, but one cannot see into the future.” He remarks, tongue-in-cheek, that he had a choice – to take his own trip again, or leave it up to some 20-year-old in search of a book, who would write it, probably, not as well!

Theroux points out, ironically, in the age of globalisation and in a flat world, what was possible the first time around is often, impossible in the next journey. This was particularly the case with India, where it was no longer possible for him to take the Great Train Journey, like he did many a year ago, with the problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He jokes about a time in Chennai when everyone there could tell him how to get to New York, but not a soul knew whether the ferry to Colombo was running! Taking a realistic perspective he notes, “The world isn’t a village you can go to, and not everyone are brothers and sisters! Over time, some countries close up and others open up.” While Vietnam and Burma may still have oppression, Laos is booming, and Singapore is heralding the brave new world. Taking a ‘prison tour’ in the ‘free world’, however, was enlightening – Theroux chose to see a Stalinist Labour Camp from the ’30s instead of Swan Lake or churches.

Travelling overland, one can really see how people are living, how they are displaced – and it’s many hours (over the quicker air route) well spent. China is unrecognisable – there are ‘ancient charming towns in a big fat city’. According to him, China is the difference between cultural revolution and money, where history hasn’t been kind: ‘Get out of the way, or we’ll run you over – a road is coming up over the pagoda!’

Theroux feels that India is not in the same boat. Attached to its past, there is a certain ‘changelessness’ about India – like the three-legged dog that will eternally roam the streets of the country. “It is like a hall of mirrors, looking down to see if it is continuous.” And the change is positive – the traveller determined to see the new India is certain to visit a call centre to meet Tarun aka Tony from Vikhroli.

As any traveller realises, their perspective of a place they visit is entirely different from that of the locals, or people who live there for long stretches of time. Vociferous about the subjective role of travel writers, Theroux agrees that the experiences could have been very different for any of the travel writers (including himself). Quoting Henry James, “The house of fiction has many windows,” Theroux insists that he is not an objective traveller. “I leap to conclusions and make wild generalisations for a living!” Travel writing isn’t a geographical survey – it is a ‘strange beast’ – its very false and speculative nature is what makes it amazing, autobiographical, and in a sense akin to life.

Words flow easily, as Theroux remarks on his role as a travel chronicler, “I wander aimlessly like a dog, but the writing has to be truthful. A travel book isn’t a love letter – it is the truth as I see it – reconstructed ‘above all to make you see’.’’

Literature: Experimental Writer

26 Wednesday Sep 2007

Posted by in Art, Literature & Culture, Interviews (All), Interviews: The Arts, Publication: Verve Magazine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Published: Verve Magazine, Speaking Volumes, September 2007
Photograph: Ritam Banerjee

A doctor, columnist, novelist and detective fiction writer, Kalpana Swaminathan is often taken aback by the absurd situations that she has been witness to in her multi-hued career. She encapsulates the banality of everyday living in her works as is evidenced by her latest offering, The Gardener’s Song. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh exchanges notes with the diverse wordsmith who delights in dabbling in different genres

Speaking01

Holding a tête-à-tête with the talented, genteel lady, simply clad in a green sari, I sit at a corner table at Crossword, Bandra. Kalpana Swaminathan juggles at being a doctor, columnist, novelist and detective fiction writer, so our conversation sparks off with her unusual career choices. She brushes off any surprise at a paediatric surgeon taking to writing, with a decisive, “You have to be interested in people.”

Sensing that nothing more is forthcoming, I switch gears to what made her start writing. Looking less than pleased, she counters, “What kind of answers do you expect? I wish I could produce something magical.” As a child shouts behind us, Swaminathan visibly softens and warms to the topic. “I love children and I love to write.” She muses, “Medicine as a profession becomes a way of life. You use perhaps ten per cent of what you learn in practice. The other 90 per cent is not used for ‘doctoring’ – it serves a larger purpose, it changes the way you look at things, it changes the value of life.”

Just like one must have a sense for the written word, Swaminathan believes that one has to learn the child’s language and understand it. She defies the myth that children can’t talk or communicate. “It is actually the adult who has to learn how to communicate and learn to understand what the child is not telling you.” It is not surprising then, that she found her stories for children easy to write – they are all fairy tales, with magical things happening in the world.

Swaminathan found herself publishing short stories at the fantastically early age of 13, but soon after went through a lean period where for years she did not get the chance to write, until after the age of 30. She recalls those years as being “rich, harrowing and exciting,” all in one breath, a time when she was studying medicine and working intensely. “When I started writing again, the initial writing was easy – it simply scaled off me. After that, I began experimenting with different genres.”

Around 1996, after her foray into children’s writing, Swami–nathan began writing columns with her colleague and partner, Ishrat Syed. As I wonder if it is easy to write in tandem with another person, she brushes it off as child’s play, simply, “We had to arrive at a distinctive style.” It was an exploratory journey, from Animal Crackers for a daily newspaper, to columns, where they wrote about different things including art, food, “mad” science, literature and lingua franca. She recalls with pride, that in 2000, when the human genome was being mapped out, they tracked its progress, in a week-by-week review column. As if reading my thoughts, about why they haven’t written a piece of science fiction yet, she mentions that their jointly written book is due to be out soon, which is to be a futuristic view of Mumbai.

When the experimental writer wanted to have some fun, she began writing detective stories. Her detective Lalli is accompanied by her niece, the writer of the book. Lalli isn’t the action-oriented detective of the racy thrillers, but the analytical thinker of Agatha Christie’s genre. Noticing the Poirot-Hastings ensemble cast of her novel, I ask the inevitable question. Swaminathan is quick to reply, “Of course, I’ve read Agatha Christie – who hasn’t? She’s a marvellous writer, as all the others out there, but I like to think of my work as my work!” Her first detective fiction, The Page 3 Murders, is a spoof on a country house murder, relocated in Mumbai, where, as she puts it, “everyone lives in each other’s pockets.” In here we find the classic English whodunit.

Tired of men and their sidekicks, Swaminathan deliberately chose an elderly woman as her detective. After all, she points out, an Indian woman would be free to do as she pleased only when post-60 and problem free! Sharp, compassionate and efficient, Lalli, a retired police officer, is considered the man in khaki’s Last Resort (LR) on troublesome murder cases.

The Gardener’s Song, Swaminathan’s latest whodunit on the murder of the nosey Mr. Rao in a Mumbai suburb, is ultimately a Mumbai book, traversing Juhu by-lanes all the way to the dilapidated buildings of Princess Street, opening up the lives and eccentricities of suburban Mumbai households and communities. Her writing is experiential: “I used to know Bombay – not what is has become in the last two or three years, but its largeness, its middle-class suburban experience.”

The banality of everyday life comes under the writer’s microscope – taken aback by the absurd situations that she has often been witness to, it is but natural for her to include these elements in her story. In The Gardener’s Song, for instance, Swaminathan describes an incident where a man is in desperate need of a blood transfusion and the only person who matches his blood type appears on the scene, only to be nearly frightened away at the thought of an HIV test. Aghast by the impact of what a rumour like that could have on his social life and marriage prospects, the donor is vouched for by his employer and colleagues as “a good man, from good family” – as if to imply, that that in itself should be sufficient proof that the man is not HIV positive!

The Gardener’s Song is not lacking in social comment, as if attempting social change in the midst and through the medium of a detective story. This touches a sensitive area, as the impassioned writer exclaims, “I do feel very strongly about these things and cannot help voicing them!” She is angered that the Indian Penal Code has a separate section for dowry death, which is basically “soft-optioning it, not calling it murder.” Swaminathan finds that Indian crimes are crimes of despair, hypocrisy, refusal to face the truth: “We can’t say bad things about people, but we can murder them. We are a cruel, violent and dishonest lot, and those who disagree, do so as they are cushioned by illusion.”

Swaminathan takes a cynical view of women in Indian society, the kind of women who sustain an obsolete patriarchy, and the feminists who are tired of being feminists. She firmly believes that every man and woman should do his or her bit. Believing that the most powerful women in Indian culture are elderly women, she holds them responsible for the crimes committed against other women. In fact, this is one of the reasons that she profiled her detective as an elderly woman.

It is clear that this is a writer who understands her audience and her subject, in equal part. Swaminathan brings out nuances of the local language in her writing, nuances that are completely absent from her crisp spoken English. As we have a dialogue about Salman Rushdie’s theory of “chutneyfication” of the English language, she describes how the language conveys the essence of the person, the local idiom and the flavour of the conversation. A large number of writers attempt to bring their part of India in their writing, as the local dialogue is a bridge between writing in the local tongue and writing in English. It is in this manner, that the language comes alive and it is easy to move between time and place, to enter and explore a region and lives in a way that one can’t imagine. In fact, a lot of the conversations in her books are taken verbatim from real life.

Swaminathan isn’t disconcerted about the dearth of detective fiction in the country. Publishing in English, in India, she explains, is only 20 years old; she expects to see a great deal more in the next five years.

Taking a few moments for this thought to sink in, the middle-aged writer, who finds the time to write on a daily basis, whilst actively practising, notes that writing per se has less to do with the craft and more to do with the experience of being a writer. And what is it that she, as a writer looks for in her work? Sitting back, taking a sip of chilled water, Swaminathan smiles and says, “Every writer is looking for two things – the inspiration to write at least one line of truth, and the aspiration to write a book!”

Literature: The Passionate Scotsman

26 Friday Jan 2007

Posted by in Art, Literature & Culture, Interviews (All), Interviews: The Arts, Publication: Verve Magazine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Published: Verve Magazine, Speaking Volumes, January 2007
Photograph: Dia Mehta

He seamlessly translates his obsession with history into words. At the launch of his latest tome – The Last Moghul – in Mumbai, William Dalrymple zooms in on the contemporary literary diaspora and its impact on the West. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh gets upfront and personal with the veteran novelist

Volumes01

I read through some parts of a 500-page historic tome and then stop to wonder what the writer, William Dalrymple, himself would be like. A hearty, jovial Scotsman was definitely not in the reckoning, but there he was, merrily sipping wine and chuckling away at every opportune moment.

“‘Why India and why Delhi’, is a question that always intrigues me,” muses William Dalrymple. “It implies that India and Delhi are not places where one would naturally prefer to live. One doesn’t think that way about New York or London. It implies as if India is second best!” He laughs heartily at the fact that English journalists never ask him this question. But scribes from Delhi and Mumbai often have this query and seek answers from him.

The Last Moghul, on the sepoy mutiny during the British Raj, was drawn from a collection of 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents stored in the National Archives in Delhi. Dalrymple collaborated with two other scholars who helped him unravel the material written in these languages and scripts. “The physical writing is mine, but the actual work, thoughts and ideas that we thrashed out over many cups of National Archives’ chai and Kareem’s kebabs was equally Mahmood’s [Farooqui] as it was mine,” he states unequivocally.

As we discuss the nature of religion affecting the uprising, Dalrymple suggests that every historian writes history imprisoned in his own time. Like he himself discovered that, in the aftermath of 9/11 and Ayodhya where one sees religious matters animating people to resistance and violence, the Delhi documents were overwhelmingly one of religious causes. To his surprise, he also found a latent jihadi element: the Delhi uprising didn’t talk about the angrez, as much as it discussed the Christians and the kafirs (infidels).

Though Dalrymple disagrees that this book serves to talk about the present or the future, he does believe that history repeats itself. There are clear lessons, and while sitting in the library researching this, the story had been played out every day in the newspapers. “At the basic level,” he says, “if in the West, you mess around with the East, invade it, the chickens will come home to roost!” He is bemused by the Americans’ surprise: it is not shocking if one country takes over people of another nation, impinges on the freedom of people, dominates their economies and their lives, it is bound to have repercussions. “So,” he emphasises, “you find a completely erroneous depiction of history of unbridgeable divides of civilisation, of eternal clashes between a free, democratic, liberal, Judeo-Christian West and the imperial, aggressive, irrational East.”

It took a Scotsman passionate about Indian history to notice the wealth of information lost to people in the dusty archives. Dalrymple is shocked that 75 per cent of material that they uncovered from the department had never been requisitioned before. He exclaims, “This is the National Archives in the Indian capital, with documents on practically the biggest event in 19th century history where the anti-colonial vote was the largest in this city than anywhere in the world, and there was no interest in exploring it. That to me is utterly, utterly extraordinary!”

Dalrymple believes that one of the reasons that a major piece of world history was more-or-less his to unfold and write about, was the lack of familiarity with Urdu or Persian by scholars and historians of today. “It is a great privilege to be in this position. But it is not as it should be. It shouldn’t be a white Englishman unravelling a major piece of Indian history.”

The writer who has lived in Delhi for 20 years, and claims modestly to know Hindi “thodi, thodi,” suddenly jumps up excitedly and asks me about Kiran Desai. Reading aloud from The Inheritance of Loss, he speaks with pleasure of the desis in New York, the taxi and delivery boys. On a serious note, he says, “The diaspora are mediating India for the West.” Kiran Desai, according to him, is a New Yorker. The last book, written by an Indian, in India, which really made it in the West, was The God of Small Things. He believes that one does not need to be validated by the recognition of the West to be an artist. Accepting that writing in a regional language may be superior to one of these Indian novels in English, he feels that Indians are no longer producing artistic work that creates an impact on the West. Thereafter follows the discussion over whether one should privilege ethnicity over experience: Shantaram is considered to be a far more realistic portrait of Mumbai than Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.

The historian, whose first travel out of Scotland was to the subcontinent, is optimistic, but believes that the jury’s out on India. Whilst there are “extraordinary cities rising out of the deserts,” there are still some major unresolved issues like the “criminality of politics, caste issues and cranky infrastructure.” Dalrymple is surprised that Pakistan has much better infrastructure than India. He describes the big difference between the two countries is that every year India’s literacy rate creeps up: this is the factor that will determine the subcontinent’s future prosperity and Pakistan’s uncertainty.

The controversial writer is proud of how easily his family has adjusted to India. His wife, Olivia, an artist, speaks better Hindi than he does, and his three children go to school in Delhi, hang out at the Red Fort, watch Dhoom:2, spend Christmas at the Tiracol Fort in Goa, weekends in Jaipur and summers in the UK. “I like walking. The frustration about living in a place like Delhi is that for most part of the year, the climate over here is not conducive for walking. There are moments in May when I am at a loss, wondering why I live in this country!” he laughs. Dalrymple considers Delhi home and Mumbai a place where he comes for fun, with a meal at Trishna, walk on the beach in Juhu and friends to visit.

Exhausted after producing “two big fatties” in five years, William Dalrymple looks forward to taking a year off, doing bits of journalism and attending literary festivals in beach resorts. He eloquently anticipates a reading at the moonlit Diwan-e-Khas in January. Already next on the list are a collection of Indo-centric religious journals, with sections on countries like Pakistan and Palestine; and a book on Akbar soon to follow. Quietly pleased with the appreciation of his work, this Scotsman, who has discovered a passion for the history of the Indian subcontinent, is determined to uncover more stones left unturned.

Literature: The World Cannot Become Uniform (Vikram Chandra)

26 Thursday Oct 2006

Posted by in Art, Literature & Culture, Interviews (All), Interviews: The Arts, Publication: Verve Magazine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Published: Verve Magazine, Features, September-October 2006
Photograph: Gaurav Bhat

Straddling two continents, wordsmith, Vikram Chandra is deeply inspired by Indian mythology and epics. In Mumbai for the release of his latest offering, Sacred Games, the award-winning US-based author speaks about modernity and ‘Indianness’ in a tête-à-tête with SITANSHI TALATI-PARIKH

Vikram01

Muted conversations, tinkling of wine glasses, dusk setting in saw the world-wide book launch of eminent writer, Vikram Chandra’s much awaited third literary offering, Sacred Games, in Mumbai at the Hilton Towers’ Rooftop. Early the next day, at the suburban Taj Lands End, Mumbai, a conversation enfolded with the award-winning novelist who surfaces in the world of words (earlier works are Red Earth and Pouring Rain and Love and Longing in Bombay) after a long sabbatical. I had to ask – why so many years before another novel – seven in the making. He replies with alacrity, “I’m just slow, very slow. It does take some perseverance and a large degree of obsession!” This trait is remarkable in the little man with precise and fluent thoughts and a great deal of patience. As the dialogue swirls around lengths and time, Chandra states that writers have their own best lengths. “I did short stories as an experiment,” he says, “to see if they would work, but even those got really long! For me, long length is natural.”

It becomes very clear that the California-based Chandra is, as one can tell from his writing, deeply inspired by Indian mythology, the epics and other magical tales. “What forms us when we are young and growing up, stays with us,” is his strong belief.

Born and brought up in India, but having left for the States out of sheer frustration at not being able to find a good course in creative writing (when he followed poet, Nissim Ezekiel, around), Chandra did his undergraduate degree magna cum laude in English. He looks back and wonders: “Before going abroad, you live in your own parochial world and somehow think that you are universal; that you are like the person on the other side of the world. Once there, within the first couple of days, you realise that you are talking in different languages, even though everyone is supposedly speaking English!

Since then, he has been studying, working and living in America, with frequent visits to the city close to his heart, Mumbai. As a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, he finds the cross-cultural mingling stimulating and educational for both sides. He marvels at the rapid changes in India too, “The modern urban Indian is a very different creature from the modern urban New Yorker. In a world that’s rapidly globalising and seemingly getting smaller, we are also fragmenting more and more and the polarities are growing more intense.”

What is his concept of ‘Indian’, then? What we think of as ‘Indian’ is actually the result of many, many changes all through the ages, Chandra explains. He points out that to talk of an unchanging Indianness and the nostalgia for an unchanging past and subsequent stability is itself a falsehood. Brooding about the changing nature of society, Chandra insists that “the world cannot become uniform, even if it is a smaller place”. He predicts an increase of the parochial and the local or an urban niche. “The seemingly contradictory thing,” he says, “is that even as we become more modern, we become more tribal.”

Chandra often and wistfully recalls the days when he and his friend, Anuradha Tandon started the adda in Goa Portuguesa, a restaurant in Mumbai, as a meeting ground for young thinkers and artists. He notes with some amusement that while the Mumbaiites would be dedicatedly taking part in discussions that went on into the wee hours of the morning, their American counterparts in DC, would rush off home by 9 p.m., since the next day was a working day. With barely concealed enthusiasm, he states, “It really was amazing and a lot of fun! That kind of cross-pollination and conversation is really helpful for all kinds of people – really good things came out of that.”

With the turmoil prevalent in the world around, Chandra believes that in some ways it’s a really good time to be a writer because there is so much turbulence and change. The material that is offered to you, that you come by – although it is often painful – is really rich. “In some sense, every book that I have written is a response to what is going on around me,” he says.

Coming from a family that is prolific in the arts, it is no surprise that he is also greatly influenced by the people around him. While his mother, Kamna Chandra, a playwright for All India Radio at the time, was concerned about how all her children would make a living by choosing a vocation in the arts, the entire family came together as a great support system for each other. The atmosphere in the house was always filled with literary discussions and varied artistic interests – what with sisters, Tanuja Chandra (film director) and Anupama Chopra (journalist-writer), to add to the talent pool.

One would imagine that with so many writers in one household, there would often be a difference of opinion. Chandra, on the other hand, looks unfazed and finds it productive. “It’s all in good faith. It doesn’t get to the point where you start resenting somebody else’s opinion. It’s great to be around people who understand the life of being somebody like that. You are, in a sense, strange and different.” Talking about his wife, Melanie Abrams, who is also a writer, Chandra recalls meeting her at an art festival in Los Angeles and staying in touch via email. He says, “We sometimes completely baffle each other. The universe we see is different from that of the other person.”

Chandra, himself, is a man of many talents. His proficiency with computers was discovered when he was working his way through film school in New York. A self-proclaimed computer geek, he loves to dabble in a bit of programming to relax!

After his ambiguous experience of being one of the writers for Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, Chandra is pretty emphatic about not returning to script-writing anytime soon. “As a novelist, you have such complete control over what you do but film-making, from the ground up, is a collaborative art. It’s thrilling at times, because you pass around ideas and then directors step in and the actors make something of what you did. At other times, you want to do something and you can’t! So, then you feel really angry and frustrated.”

Funnily enough, Chandra recalls with a sheepish look, “I actually went to film school because I was scared of being a writer!” After his BA, he was lost and didn’t know how to earn his livelihood. For a year he drifted around taking up odd jobs from that of a night baker to a security guard and furniture mover in Los Angeles. Then he decided to go to film school, figuring that at least that way he would have a chance at a creative job. Ironically, it was film school that led him right back to writing books!

As the discussion revolves around the topics he chooses for his books, Chandra matter-of-factly states, “One writes something close to what one reads and gives pleasure. The Victorians, for instance. I love the diffusion of characters…!” He believes that Indians would necessarily write about the Indian experience, since that is where they are coming from. However, he warns, “One does have to be careful about getting stuck in an ethnic ghetto…for instance, the temptation to write yet another story about cultural confusion.”

For the choice of the detective genre for his latest book, Chandra believes it is a neglected and curiously pleasing form, which weaves across cultures. The detective incarnates the scientific method and the form fits with logic and reason against the chaotic. “In the end,” he says with a smile, “you love it because it comforts us and restores order.”

Has the million dollar-signing contract restored any order for Chandra? Quick to allay the thought that he is discontent, he states a little ruefully, “People presume that with that kind of number, you are set for life. After paying taxes, what you are left with isn’t enough to even buy a house! At the end of it, you are still faced with the task of making a living and feeding your dog. It’s not as if you are transported into some kind of heaven!”

A kind of heaven for Chandra, it appears, is his time distributed between his two homes. He does miss Mumbai and writes about it through the characters in his new book as well. “That is also not to say that the city is not trying and exhausting and wears on you like nothing,” he chuckles. He finds the travel and distance to be a much-needed perspective. “Getting away is a sort of purposeful dislocation – and each time I return, I can feel the city experientially again, renewed.”

While stating that there is so much territory left to explore, Chandra does show a semblance of weariness as he states that he has no plans for another book as yet. A holiday is on the official charts for him – a much required and enforced one.

Quietly contemplative, he concludes, “I realise now how lucky it is to be able to do work in the world that you actually enjoy. It’s not a privilege that everyone gets.”